by M A Bennett
‘Stop it.’ Gideon wiped his eyes. ‘You’re killing me.’
Just as he said that, the door opened and Ina entered the room, holding a plate of food in each hand. She was followed by three footmen, also holding plates.
The main course.
‘Of course, my favourite goddess,’ I said to no one in particular, ‘my favourite goddess is Durga.’ I was sure they had stopped listening, distracted by the arrival of the delicious-smelling food, but I ploughed on. ‘She has ten arms and wields ten swords. She rides on the back of a tiger and she sweeps down on her enemies seeking furious vengeance, leaving them helpless before her.’
I gave Ina a small, tight smile as she put the venison stew in front of me. She winked and I had to drop my eyes quickly before I gave the game away. I studied the plate in front of me instead. Here and there in the steaming dark brown mass I could see little red fragments of chilli, gleaming like rubies in a dung heap. I took up my silver knife and fork. They felt heavy and cool in my sweaty fingers. I had no intention of using them. Ina had done her job well – eating that deer stew would be like forking up dynamite.
The especially evil thing about bhut jolokia is that it takes a good few seconds for the body to recognise what it has ingested. All the Medievals – drunk enough to be peckish – had taken quite a few good, hearty bites. Overcome by a sudden feeling of calm, I stretched out my hand for the wine bottle, set my glass upright and poured in the remainder of the wine.
Then I waited.
I did not have to wait long.
‘My God ! ’
‘He won’t help you now, Gidders,’ I said drily.
As they all began to gasp and choke, I announced, ‘You have just had a dose of bhut jolokia, otherwise known as ghost pepper. It is the hottest chilli in the world.’ I took a leisurely sip from my glass and, I must say, wine has never tasted better. With some pleasure I recalled the dreadful symptoms of eating bhut jolokia. The agonising, burning pain in the mouth and throat. The stomach cramps, the vomiting. The involuntary tears that spring from the eyes. The increased heart rate until you think your chest will burst. The tongue that feels like a hot coal. The breath that feels like you are a fire eater. The liquids that your helpless body produces to try to repel the invader – the snot, tears and sweat that pour from your facial orifices until you are a blubbering mess. And the beautiful thing was, the symptoms lasted for at least twenty agonising minutes. I watched them dispassionately, all the Medievals, as they began to disintegrate in front of my eyes, almost scientifically assessing their differing reactions. Francesca began frantically wiping the inside of her mouth with her napkin. Charles took off his glasses as they actually began to steam up before his eyes. Miranda wailed like a cat, and Gideon began to repeatedly bash his fist on the table. Serena jumped up from her chair, as if she could escape her own burning throat, and then vomited helplessly all down her satin gown. And Rollo? He began to sweat profusely, his blue eyes more striking than ever in his reddening face. They all began to fight over the water jug and I let them for a moment before saying kindly, ‘I would not do that. It only makes it worse.’
It was true. I had once looked into the science of it and water only spreads the capsaicin – the hot molecules of the chilli – around the soft tissues of your mouth, making them burn more.
I enjoyed the show, calmly drinking my wine.
‘Get me cook,’ choked Rollo. As he leaped for the bell I moved like a cat. I knew if he pressed it that the little bell down in the kitchen that said Great Hall would be clanging like mad, and help would come. I put my hand over his. He was so weak it was easy to wrest his fingers away from the bell.
‘There is no point laying blame,’ I said coldly. ‘I did this.’
He clutched his throat, eyes streaming. ‘You?’
‘Yes. Just a jape, old boy, don’t you know?’
Gideon staggered towards me, his face puce. ‘Help us.’
‘Well, let us see,’ I said. ‘Let’s find out who in the class has been paying attention.’ I strode over to the tiger-skin rug and stood on Shere Khan’s stripes. ‘How many swords does Durga have?’
They looked at each other, choking and gagging.
‘How many? ’ I repeated.
Charles was the first to speak. He always paid attention in lessons. ‘Ten.’
‘And which animal does she ride?’
‘A tiger.’ This time Miranda spoke. ‘A tiger.’
‘And what does she want?’
No one answered.
‘What does she want?’
‘Vengeance,’ said Francesca. ‘She wants vengeance.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. I wandered leisurely to the duelling pistols, where they hung back on the wall. I caressed one pewter barrel, taking my time. Fascinating really – except for those two tiny crosses, you couldn’t tell which was which. ‘Now, one more question. Then I’ll help you.’ I walked back to the rug and put my foot on Shere Khan’s head, all-powerful now.
‘What is my name?’
They looked at each other again, wiping eyes and clutching throats. ‘M-Mowgli.’
‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘That is not my name. What is it?’ I decided to prompt them. ‘Not what you call me. What I call myself.’
None of them knew. They’d been calling me Mowgli for so long they’d forgotten.
‘We are sorry, Mowgli,’ said Serena. ‘Help us.’
I turned to the archvillain. ‘Are you sorry, Gidders?’
‘Yes,’ he gasped. ‘Yes.’
‘Then call me by my name and I’ll help you.’
They looked to each other in their suffering, all crying real tears, their mouths working like fishes, for what seemed like an age.
‘Hardy!’ It was Rollo who shouted. Then, softer, like a sob, ‘Hardy.’ He fell to his knees before me on the rug, as if paying homage. ‘Your name is Hardy.’
I went right up to him and petted him like a dog. His golden hair was soft under my hand. ‘That is right,’ I said benignly. I turned to the rest. ‘Will you all remember that?’
‘Yes, Hardy,’ they chorused as best they could, and the power swelled in my heart so much that it frightened me. ‘Good,’ I said, softer now, icily calm.
I went to the bell and pressed it once, hard. I walked past my vanquished enemies without another glance but tossed the help they needed over my shoulder as I went.
‘Tell them to bring milk. It is the only thing that helps.’
And with that, I stalked out of the room.
Night
I had to tell someone of my triumph. I had to tell Ina.
As I leaped up the grand staircase, three steps at a time, I wanted to laugh and scream and cry and shout all at once. I felt all powerful, felt fire burning through my veins, as if it was I who had eaten the bhut jolokia. B J, I thought – and it seemed suddenly perfect that the instrument of my vengeance had those initials. So then I did laugh.
But, of course, I had a while to wait before I could talk to her. Although I was fairly certain that dessert and coffee and port would now not be required in the Great Hall, the Medievals would require the more prosaic fare of glasses of milk and Alka-Seltzer before they could lay their evil little heads to rest. Poor Ina would be running back and forth at their beck and call. I needed occupation until I could talk to her, and, as the servants would be otherwise engaged and I was returning to school tomorrow, I went to my room and packed my suitcase myself.
In my room my triumph dissipated into a flat feeling of disappointment. Although I did not think the Medievals would bully and belittle me any more, and I certainly did not think they would call me anything but Hardy from now on, the price was high. I would never be invited anywhere again, never be allowed to cross the threshold into that exclusive inner sanctum. I could watch Rollo de Warlencourt all I liked, at school, at Oxford, at Sandhurst, but I would never be like him now. Never would I be an English gentleman. I’d packed this very suitcase so full of hope, and now I was re
packing it, the hope was quite, quite gone.
Still, I’d had my victory, and the victory must be shared. I had made one friend this weekend, and not at all the one I thought I would make. So once I was sure the Medievals were all settled I went to wait by the back stairs. I knew enough about stately homes by now to know that, while the greatest slept, the least were the last to rest.
Again, I felt I could not risk Ina’s reputation by seeking out her room, but I had thought that I might be able to waylay her on her way up to bed from the kitchens. As it turned out, I was quite wrong. I saw her on the stairs all right. But it was quite a different Ina from the one I had come to know.
She was wearing a tiny miniskirt that looked like it was made of silver foil, and her legs, encased in fishnet tights, seemed to go on forever. She had on a sleeveless white top with a polo neck and an imitation fur, dyed baby pink, slung across her shoulders. Her lips were painted the same very pale pink; her eyelids were painted silver and over each eye she’d drawn a heavy black line, which flicked out at the edges, so that her green eyes resembled a cat’s. She looked incredible and entirely unknowable, like an alien from the moon.
I stepped from the shadows. ‘Armstrong!’ I whispered.
She jumped a mile in the air, then put a hand to her chest. ‘Aldrin! Why, man, y’almost gave me a heart attack.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Who are you? Me da?’ She stuck her tongue out at me, pink as her lips. Then she smiled. ‘There’s a hop in the village.’
‘A what?’
‘A hop. A dance. A disco. In the institute. The village hall.’
‘On a Sunday?’
‘Bank Holiday Monday tomorrow, isn’t it? Isn’t that why you lot are here? Long weekend?’
She was right. I’d be going back to STAGS tomorrow, but classes would not start until Tuesday.
She grabbed my arm, a mischievous sparkle in her cat’s eyes. ‘Come with me.’
I looked down at my dinner jacket. ‘Can I go like this?’
‘Smart suits didn’t do the Beatles any harm,’ she said. ‘Here.’ She rolled up the sleeves of my jacket and ruffled my hair with both hands. ‘There. You look like a rock star.’
‘Like a Beatle?’ I said, amused.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘just like a Beatle.’ She smiled, and I smiled back, and suddenly my heart lifted again.
‘Come on,’ she said, taking my hand. ‘And stay quiet, mind.’
We sneaked out of the tradesman’s door and walked round the side onto the drive. As we got further and further away from the house my mood continued to lift. I had well and truly burned my bridges at Longcross Hall. It didn’t matter what I did now, and it felt good to get away.
For Ina, though, the stakes were considerably higher.
‘I take it you are not supposed to be out of the house?’
‘Not on your nelly,’ she said – a strange expression, which I took to mean the negative. ‘Us maids get one afternoon off a week; no followers; no dances. Mrs Nicky – that’s Mrs Nicholson, the housekeeper – she’s a right tartar and I’ll be in forty kinds of trouble if I’m caught.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘The institute in Longcross village. That’s where the hop is. It’ll be jumping by now – we’re a bit late to the party.’
On the way we talked about her family. She had two brothers and a sister. ‘And are they in service too?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Our Peggy, the little’un, she’s at the village school. Our Billy’s at the grammar school. Our Tom, the eldest, he’s a slater and tiler.’
‘Shouldn’t you be in school too?’
‘I passed the exam to go. But me mam and dad couldn’t afford to send me.’
I didn’t see the problem. ‘But a grammar school is free of charge, is it not?’
‘They couldn’t afford the uniform to send a girl. They could barely afford the boys’ ones. Our Peggy won’t be able to go either. She’ll go into service too.’ She looked at me sideways. ‘There’s no work in the North East. No money for fancy clothes.’
I did not know what to say to this, walking along in my Savile Row evening suit. ‘Your outfit tonight is wonderful.’
‘I made this with me own fair hands.’
‘You look like a spacegirl. Like Barbarella.’ I was not practised at talking to girls, but I thought Ina would like this. And she did. I could see her teeth gleaming in the moonlight as she smiled.
At length we saw the lights of the village, and the village hall lit up brightest of all. Before we even got near I could hear the heavy beat and twanging guitars of pop music.
We had to get a ticket on the door from a woman sitting at a trestle table. She gave us each a number from a book of pink raffle tickets (to my great shame I had no pocket change, so Ina had to pay a sixpence for me). The heat of the interior hit me like a wall and I had a moment of misgiving. All the revellers were dressed like Ina, in a thoroughly modern and up-to-date fashion. Now I was the alien. How would these white spacemen take to me? But then the disc jockey began to play the Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun’. Ina and I looked at each other and grinned delightedly. It was a sign.
Someone pressed a beer into my hand, and then the bright young things dragged me off to dance.
It was such a contrast to my weekend at the Hall. No one in this tiny northern village seemed to mind the colour of my skin. So many of the young people called me cool, or rad, or groovy, or other words that I had never heard applied to me. It sounds crazy, but I belonged. When I wasn’t dancing, these familiar strangers talked to me about George Harrison and Ravi Shankar – the Beatles have made India cool, so I have more to thank them for than my dress sense. There was no formality. I have no idea where my dinner jacket went. I was offered drink, cigarettes; there were hands on my person at all times, flung around my shoulders, in my hair, round my waist. It was egalitarian, and insolent, and beautiful. That night, after being stuck in the aspic of the 1920s, I was a child of the sixties.
The music took hold of me and I sang along to songs I knew and songs I didn’t. The words, the wonderful nonsensical words, were a jumble of psychedelic happiness – yellow submarines and octopus’s gardens and honky tonk women. I danced like a savage with anyone and everyone, boys and girls, but kept coming back to Ina.
‘Let’s get some air,’ she said eventually.
We went outside to cool down and sat on a low wall, drinking punch from plastic cups. The music hummed through the walls and windows, the mawkish lyrics reaching our ringing ears even where we sat.
‘All the songs are about love,’ I said. ‘Every single one of them.’
‘What else is there to sing about?’ she said. ‘What else is there to think about? What’s more important than who you’re going to end up with?’
Even after all my years at an English public school, some colloquial phrases confused me. ‘End up with?’
‘Who you’re going to marry.’
‘Ah. Well, that I already know.’
That surprised her. ‘Really? ’ She opened her eyes very wide.
‘Her name is Ritu Rathor. She is of a good Rajput family.’
‘Do you like her?’
‘From what I know of her, she seems very pleasant.’
‘Hold on. You have met her, surely?’
‘Once.’
‘But you’ll start walking out with her? When you go home, I mean.’
‘Walking out?’
‘Courting.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘since I’m at school over here, the next time I see her will probably be at our wedding.’
She shook her head. ‘So strange,’ she said. ‘How can you build a life with someone you barely know?’
‘Because her parents and mine have determined that we would get along well together. The plan is that we learn to love each other.’ It was hard to defend a scheme for which I had so little enthusiasm, but I gave it a try. ‘And it seems to work. The divorce rate
is higher in England than in India.’
Ina thought for a moment, looking out across the village green. ‘I’m not sure that love can be learned,’ she said, now looking into my eyes. ‘I think it just happens.’
I held her gaze. ‘I think so too.’
Just then the disc jockey took to the microphone, interrupting what was becoming a most interesting conversation. ‘All right, all you cats and kittens,’ we could hear him saying, in a strange hybrid of Ina’s accent and an American one. ‘We’re getting ready to sloooooow things down.’ He dragged out the word.
I looked at Ina, not sure what this meant. She took hold of my hand and dragged me back inside to the heat and the dance floor. She wound her arms about my neck and we danced like that, cheek to cheek. I was so surprised that it took me a second to recognise the song that was playing – the plinky-plonky guitar arpeggio, the breathy little-girl voice, begging the tiger to show her how to kiss him.
‘What is this song?’ I asked Ina, as we swayed to the beat.
‘It’s called Teach Me Tiger, by April Stevens,’ she said in my ear. ‘Don’t you love it?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I replied, listening to the wah wah chorus.
The last time I’d heard that song, I’d been scared out of my skin, in that dark passageway of Longcross Hall, with the gramophone playing on its own. Now it had no power to frighten me. It had all been a trick, and I had been the hunted then. Now I was the hunter.
Or was I? It took me just a few revolutions of the dance floor to realise I was still being pursued, but in a very different way. Ina’s hands moved to caress my back, my hair, then she took her cheek from mine and put her lips on mine instead.
They were soft and warm, and she used them skilfully with barely a clash of teeth.
And I felt nothing.
I was kissing the prettiest girl in the room, but despite the music and the moonlight I felt … nothing. And it wasn’t to do with Ina, or even with Ritu.
It was to do with me.
Then the lights flickered and came on, showing the ruin of the room – paper streamers and plastic cups on the floor; cigarette butts and even false eyelashes among the detritus. All the revellers, including, I am sure, myself, looked very different. But something else had changed too. Ina and I held onto each other’s hands but stood far apart now. She squeezed my fingers. ‘Come on,’ she said, smiling a little sadly. ‘Let’s go.’